


The Fair Woman

by tansypool



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Daemons, Jordan College, Worldbuilding, based on a line later altered to remove this bit, some faint spoilers for the secret commonwealth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-09
Updated: 2019-12-09
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:01:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 657
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21731908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tansypool/pseuds/tansypool
Summary: There was a Master of Jordan College, whose dæmon was a fair woman.Inspired by elements of The Secret Commonwealth.
Kudos: 29





	The Fair Woman

**Author's Note:**

> _On each coffin, Lyra was interested to see, a brass plaque bore a picture of a different being: this one a basilisk, this a fair woman, this a serpent, this a monkey. She realized that they were images of the dead men’s dæmons._
> 
> This line has been altered in later editions... but it's fun to play with, too, and I can't get it out of my head.

There were stories told of old Masters of Jordan, of men of knowledge and learning, of fame and fortune and infamy, of those whose deeds were praised, and of those whose only saving grace unto their bones was the sanctuary of the walls of Jordan’s crypts.  


One such man from centuries past was a pioneer for his time, a man who mapped and understood the farthest-flung regions of the farthest-flung continents, and his dæmon, they say, was a fair woman.

Nothing else was unusual about this man. He came to Jordan as an adult, his explorations largely complete, fluent in languages never heard within the shores of Brytain, but his upbringing was in southern Anglia, with long-dead well-to-do parents, whose wills had left him rich enough to wander of his own volition for many years. And he had done so, returning with a rich depth and breadth of knowledge, and yearning to share all he had learned, rarely setting foot outside of Brytain again. His works remained vital to the College long after his passing, until students reading his words from long ago sought to continue his work, his studies, his travels. Few of them realised that the man whose work had driven them was the same man spoken of as though a myth.

He would always present well, always on time to his lectures, his notes complete, his students able to come and listen to him after, should they so choose. Many did.

His dæmon always stood to his right, as neatly presented as the man. Disconcerting though it was to see a woman beside him, it became the norm for his contemporaries, the man and his strange dæmon no stranger than the traveller with a dæmon thought mythological, or with a dæmon believed a hoax. Though uncanny, he was still a man, and a scholar.

He was a well-spoken man, with a soft, melodious voice that others would nonetheless lean in to hear. His dæmon spoke with the same softness, the same lilt in her voice, and the others would lean in to hear her, too. He would start an idea, and she would finish it; she would suggest something, and he would continue along that line of thought.

The scholar would take to his quarters early, and would rise precisely when needed and no earlier. He took no visitors, and allowed no servants to clean, his quarters remaining entirely his own. He would often forgo the supper prepared for the staff, instead spending his evenings alone, and servants would whisper of his prodigious appetite, of the dinners requested and left at a closed door, empty plates collected at the end of the evening. And so was his habit, for his entire life.

He passed away in his sleep at a grand old age, somewhere in his eighties, a scholar for twenty of those years, and then the Master for thirty. The threshold for his quarters was crossed for the first time in decades upon the discovery that his breakfast lay untouched - the man could have still been asleep were he not entirely alone, his hands neatly folded on his chest, the window open to the gentle breeze of the morning.

He was interred in the crypt, his name and his dæmon's borne in brass for eternity by his bones.

There were stories unknown and untold, too. Two dæmons alone, a raven and a vixen, wandering a desert together, where they were abandoned, fifty long years ago - never parting, just as the people with whom they had once been singular beings did. They had been torn from those people, left to wait where they could not cross, waiting for an eternity, the ache in them never fading.

They lay to rest together one night, as they always did. In the light of the morning, the vixen faded into nothing, and the raven woke alone. By the time the sun set again, he had vanished, too.


End file.
